automatic renice in 4.1 bsd?

[David Elliott]

> We have started to notice a problem with some
> people's login csh being reniced. Since we always
> have a few processes running, these people's terminal
> appears to be dead.
> 
> By reniceing the csh to 0, the terminal becomes alive
> again, and renice reports the old priority as 19.
> 
> Is there some thing in 4.1 bsd that renices people when
> the system load gets too high?

Another problem (besides the kernel renicing processes) is the csh
builtin command `nice'. If you look at the documentation, you will
see that `nice' with no arguments claims to set the nice of the current
shell to 4.

The code that attempts to do this does a nice(20), a nice(-10), and a
nice(4) (supposedly, this changes the nice to the maximum, back to 0,
and then to 4), but if you aren't the superuser, this sets the nice
to 19 and that's all. (Does anyone know why this would have worked
at some time?)

It is possible that someone inadvertently typed `nice' with no arguments,
or that you have a prankster going around typing `nice' on people's
terminals without them knowing.

			David